McLaren plant planned for Woking

Hundreds of jobs could be created under plans by the McLaren Automotive company to build a new sports car in Britain.

If planning permission is approved by Woking council, McLaren will build a facility capable of producing 20 high-performance sports cars a day on a site next to its technology centre in the Surrey town.

The plant would create 800 jobs as well as supporting an estimate 1,500 indirect jobs in the local area, with the first car expected to be produced by 2011.

Annual production is set to increase from around 1,000 cars to 4,000 at a 17,760m sq site, which will be designed by a team of architects led by Foster & Partners who created the adjacent McLaren technology centre.

McLaren Automotive chairman Ron Dennis said: "Ever since we revealed the McLaren F1 sports car in 1992, it has been a long-held dream of mine to launch a McLaren sports car company.

"Designing, developing and selling globally the best sports cars in the world is just half of that equation; building them to previously unmatched levels of quality, with ground-breaking technologies in a production facility in the UK is key to satisfying that dream.

"I believe that if the McLaren production centre is given the go ahead, it will be an engineering centre of excellence of which McLaren and the UK can be proud."